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SPORTS A17
Thursday 11 February 2016

Caddies lose Rivera
leaves
lawsuit against
Carolina Panthers’ head coach Ron Rivera leaves af-
U.S. PGA Tour ter NFL Super Bowl 50 football game against the Den-
ver Broncos, Sunday, Feb. 7, 2016, in Santa Clara, Ca-
DOUG FERGUSON lif. The Broncos won 24-10.
AP Golf Writer
PEBBLE BEACH, California Associated Press
(AP) — Caddies lost their Page 19
class-action lawsuit against
the U.S. PGA Tour when a
federal judge in California
ruled they signed a con-
tract with the tour that re-
quires them to wear bibs
as part of their uniform and
cannot claim that corpo-
rate sponsorship on the
bibs makes them human
billboards.
U.S. District Judge Vince
Chhabria dismissed the
lawsuit late Tuesday with
prejudice, which typically
means it cannot be refiled.
The decision came just
over a year after caddies
filed the lawsuit in northern
California. The lawsuit be-
gan with 81 caddies and
had grown to 168.
Chhabria dismissed all
seven of the contractual
claims.
The caddies have been at
odds with the tour for years
over what they perceive
as poor treatment.
They are not allowed in
clubhouses, and at some
tournaments are not al-
lowed in the locker room.
“The caddies’ overall
complaint about poor
treatment by the tour has
merit, but this federal law-
suit about bibs does not,”
Chhabria said.
At the heart of the lawsuit
was a claim that the tour
was using them as “hu-
man billboards” because
the bibs they wore on the
course, which featured the
logo of the title sponsor,
amounted to advertising
for which they received no
compensation. Lawyers for
the caddies estimated the
value of the advertising at
$50 million a year.

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